Electric Power – Silently Winning the Battle of the Streets?

Might electric vans overcome the ludicrous pantomime played out on British high streets every day?

Imagine the scene...

You’re walking along the high street, as a large white van draws up alongside and parks against the pavement, on a double yellow line. Hazard warning lights flick on, the driver jumps out and runs into the adjacent shop. He returns two minutes later to find two men dressed in yellow and black regalia – sporting silly looking hats – circling his van. One is tapping away into what looks like a handheld cash register, the other is photographing the van’s number plates. A row between the driver and the parking wardens ensues, but a parking ticket is ultimately stuck on the window of the van. In the meantime, another guy has started to unload palettes of coke from the back of the van. All the while, traffic - which has been reduced from two lanes down to one - is building into a steady queue as it jostles to pass the van.

Amidst hullabaloo about climate change and traffic congestion, no one seems interested in one of the biggest issues facing UK cities – service and delivery. We now live in a society that works 24 hours a day, and needs constant servicing, yet we have made cities fantastically difficult to bring goods into and out of. Hence the situation described above. The back street delivery alley and the loading bay of yore have gone – the space is too precious – filled in with something else. So how do we service our shops? - By blocking up the streets with delivery vehicles at the busiest times of the day. It’s a problem worthy of further attention – and perhaps not as difficult to solve as it first appears.

The most logical solution would be to make most deliveries by night - when streets are quiet and disruption to traffic will be minimal – but in city centres, where shops and homes sit side by side, this raises a huge issue – noise. Indeed nighttime deliveries to supermarkets are such an issue in London that most boroughs now require companies to apply for permits if they wish to drop off goods at night.

Electric delivery vehicles are a part of the solution here – their silent-ness would allow night-time deliveries to be made quietly, allowing the residents of Kensington to sleep soundly in their beds whilst Tesco stock up on beans at 4am. There are numerous other benefits in replacing diesel trucks with electric ones, but with regard to allowing deliveries by night, the main one is noise. UK readers will be aware of the now dying breed that is the British milkman, who delivers milk daily direct to doorsteps, at around 4am. It’s no coincidence that the standard issue vehicle for such activities was the near silent, if speed-challenged, electric milk-float. Of course, a vehicle with a top-speed of ten miles per hour would be a little problematic for Tesco’s - but a couple of start up firms appear to have seen the need for fast, quiet delivery trucks and have identified a market that could grow very quickly.

A Modec electric delivery van

The signs are that their eye for a niche is already being rewarded. Following the sandwich chain Pret-a-Manger’s purchase of six of Axim’s light electric delivery vans last year, Smiths have apparently sold a number of their new electric trucks to Starbucks. Most promising of all though are Modec, a start-up from Coventry who have pre-orders for 15 of their funky-looking 2-tonne electric van from Tesco’s – who will use them to supplement the diesel Mercedes sprinters they currently use for home delivery services. As we recently saw Tesco pledging to go green in a big way, and with Modec rumoured to be planning trucks with much higher payloads, don’t be surprised if this is the start of a trickle that eventually becomes a flood of electric vehicles operated by Tesco’s and others.

Noise and environmental aren’t the only benefit from running a fleet of electric delivery vehicles – finance is a key driving force. Pret estimate that their fleet of electric vans will save them a staggering £462,000 over the next 3 years, probably because electric vans and trucks - just like cars - are exempt from paying UK road tax and congestion charging in central London.

Larger vehicles such as vans and trucks are a very logical format in which to develop this propulsion technology. The large chassis and innate weight of trucks and vans means that they are perfect platforms for battery-electric motors, as they can easily cope with the weight of the batteries – the big problem in car platforms. Furthermore, delivery vans and trucks tend to be used at low speeds in urban areas, where internal combustion engines are at their least efficient, and concerns about exhaust-pipe pollution are greatest. Battery electric vehicles are very efficient at low speed, and produce no direct tail-pipe exhaust. All of which would seem to suggest that battery powered delivery vehicles would go a long way to overcoming many of the increasingly complex difficulties involved in servicing and supply our cities.

Finally, how about this as a ‘piggyback’ development? Modec are developing a system that allows the batteries in their trucks to be ‘swapped’ over in just a few minutes. Could this become the format for a fuel station of the future – where ‘charged’ and ‘empty’ batteries are exchanged at a local charging depot thus removing the need to charge a battery vehicle up for hours on end?